2025 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize Finalists

Hub City Press is pleased to announce the six finalists for the 2025 New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, which is awarded to a Southern poet with no more than one previously published full-length collection. The winner will receive $1500 and publication by Hub City Press. The winner will be selected by judge Derrick Austin. He received a BA from the University of Tampa and, in 2014, an MFA from the University of Michigan. He is the author ofTenderness (BOA Editions, 2021), winner of the 2021 Isabella Gardener Award, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016), selected by Mary Szybist for the 2015 A. Poulin Jr. Prize. A Cave Canem fellow, he is the recipient of fellowships from The Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing and Stanford University. He was born in Homestead, Florida and currently lives in Oakland, California. Derrick is a former Hub City Writers Project writer-in-residence, and we are thrilled to welcome him back as our tenth judge of our poetry prize. 

The finalists are Acie Clarkfor Small Talk, Delicia Danielsfor Abolition Chronicles, Danielle DeTiberus for Better the Girl Know Now, John Fenlon Hogan for The Ghost Lozenge, Rodrick Minor for The Potlikkers, and Caleb Nolen for Afterlight.

Acie Clark is a trans writer from Florida and Georgia. They received their MFA from the University of Alabama where they worked for Black Warrior Review as the online editor. They teach in the Film, Theatre, and Creative Writing Department at the University of Central Arkansas and as a summer instructor at Interlochen Center for the Arts. They are a 2024-2025 Fine Arts Work Center fellow in poetry. Their recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, Quarterly West, Salamander, and the Arkansas International.

Delicia Daniels is a poet, activist, and person who stutters. Her first publication, The Language We Cry In, was selected as the Discovery Prize winner for the 2017 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards. Her second poetry collection, Abolition Chronicles, was selected as a finalist for the 2023 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics Book Prize and The Poetic Justice Institute Prize (Fordham University Press).

Danielle DeTiberus teaches creative writing in Charleston, SC. Her work has appeared in Academy of American Poets, Copper Nickel, Entropy, The Missouri Review, River Styx, Waxwing and elsewhere. Her poems have been featured in Verse Daily, the anthology Best American Poetry, and The Missouri Review’s special Project Muse collection Ascendant: Seven Promising Poets. Her manuscript Better the Girl Know Now was a finalist for Black Lawrence Press’ Hudson Prize and a semi-finalist for the University of Wisconsin Press' Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. She served for ten years as the Program Chair for the Poetry Society of South Carolina, bringing nationally renowned poets to Charleston for readings and seminars.

John Fenlon Hogan lives in Virginia and has published poems in the Boston Review, Colorado Review, West Branch, and elsewhere.

Rodrick Minor is a visual artist, poet, and Black foodways advocate from Mississippi and Louisiana. He’s a four-time member of the Baton Rouge National Poetry Slam Team, the 2015 Baton Rouge Grand Slam Champion, and a member of the 2016 Philadelphia National Poetry Slam Team. Their poetry explores the study of Afro-gastronomy, how food is central to identity, traditions, intimacy, spirituality and culture overall. His work has appeared in Voicemail Poems, The American Poetry Review, Knights Library Magazine, Micro Podcast, Duende, Poemhood: Our Black Revival: History, Folklore and The Black Experience: A Young Adult Poetry Anthology (Harper Collins, 2024), Callaloo, Nashville Review, Bellingham Review, and other forthcoming presses and journals. He is a Best of Net nominee, Cave Canem Fellow, Tin House Fellow, Watering Hole Fellow, Winter Tangerine Alumnus, Hurston-Wright Fellow, and BOAAT Press Fellow. He is currently an editor for Voicemail Poems. He earned an MFA in poetry at Randolph College, where he was awarded the Nancy Craig Blackburn ’71 Fellowship.

Caleb Nolen grew up in Pennsylvania and Maryland. He completed his MFA at the University of Virginia and has received support from Blue Mountain Center and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he was a work-study scholar. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, FENCE, The Georgia Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere.